If I Had Your Face - Frances Cha

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Blurb (on back of book): A debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossibly high standards of beauty, secret room salons catering to wealthy men, strict social hierarchies, and K-pop fan mania. "Even as a girl, I knew the only chance I had was to change my face... even before a fortune-teller told me so." Kyuri is a beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a "room salon," an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood.

Her roommate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds herself in a precarious relationship with the super-wealthy heir to one of Korea's biggest companies.

Down the hall in their apartment building lives Ara, a hair stylist for whom two preoccupations sustain her: obsession with a boy-band pop star, and a best friend who is saving up for the extreme plastic surgery that is commonplace.

And Wonna, one floor below, is a newlywed trying to get pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they can afford to raise and educate in the cutthroat economy.

Together, their stories tell a tale that's seemingly unfamiliar, yet unmistakably universal in the way that their tentative friendships may have to be their saving grace.

MY OPINION: ***

I was very excited to read this book when I heard what it was about on YouTuber Jack Edward's book video. It centers on Korean beauty standards and covers a myriad of important topics that are pertinent to people like me, an Asian American female growing up in times when beauty standards and media depictions of what is "beautiful" is especially rampant. However, despite my love of the overall idea, the execution did not hit the mark that I was hoping it would hit. 

I would like to start out by saying that I loved the topics that this book covered. We get to see the role of gender norms in a woman's life, prostitution, misogyny, the role of plastic surgery, and as I stated already, beauty standards. Especially for Asian women, beauty is highly prized as a main attribute for females; this is not to say that this isn't true for women (and men) of other races. 

However, there is a strong current of colorism that is unfortunately present in Asian American beauty standards in particular, as women struggle to make their skin whiter and appear young and pale. I don't want this review to be a rant on my feelings about the horrid beauty standards and gender norms that society has managed to place on women but I would like to say that I am glad that this book touched upon them from an Asian perspective, which I've found quite rare in my reading experience.

My main criticism with the book is that it was far too short. I read it on Apple Books and usually my books are around 600-700 pages long in the Apple Books format (which usually equate to around 400 pages in a normal paperback). However, this book was only 400 Apple Book pages, which I believe is less than 300 pages in the paper version. I personally think the author tackled way too many topics for so short of a time period that we ended up seeing brief mentions of serious issues without any real dive into the issues and consequences of them. 

The book follows four different narrators, each Korean women with their own separate struggles. While I liked the idea of them all, I think that there were too many different voices struggling for their time in the spotlight in less than 300 pages. I found it confusing to figure out which girl was speaking, to be quite honest, which may be because I took many breaks in between sittings of this book because, while short, there were times when it did seem to drag on. I think we could have seen a much more analytical and complex narrative if we only had two girls' perspectives. We don't need to cut out the other girls, per say, but instead make them more of side characters in the stories of two main girls. 

Ara is a non-verbal hair stylist who has direct access to the beauty industry. I liked the inclusion of K-pop with her character because I do think K-pop is a core part of Korean culture and society and also an unfortunate proponent of the issues this book touched upon, whether they mean to or not. 

Kyuri is a room salon girl, which is basically a prostitute, whose beauty is the source of her life and career. She's had several successful occurrences with plastic surgery, which is highlighted a lot through her friend's mimicry of her surgeries. I personally do not feel credited enough to speak on the controversy behind plastic surgery that is done for cosmetic/beauty reasons, but I do wish that this book touched more upon both sides of the issue. 

Miho and Wonna were both sort of irrelevant for me, one of them an artist with a torrent of guilt for dating her dead friend's boyfriend, and one of them pregnant and hateful of her husband. To be quite honest, neither of them stood out and I think both of them could have easily been cut from the book to save room for more character development of Ara and Kyuri. Miho and Wonna's stories also did not seem to coincide with the overarching themes of the book and instead introduced new subplots that felt unnecessary and choppy. 

Frances Cha writes brilliantly. There were several remarks about the various beauty standards and rampant misogyny present in society that I found particularly intriguing. However, I wish she could have expanded more on these ideas rather than just making a few observations on really prevalent and horrible issues and then moving on. I would have loved to have seen more development and analysis of why these issues are present and how they are affecting people. I understand that this book is not meant to be a feminist take-down of various gender roles and standards but I would have liked to have seen a bit more of that undertone just because the author decided to tackle these issues so blatantly. 

This book doesn't really have a plot and instead is more of a day-to-day story of four different women's lives in Korea. I normally am a character person anyway so I wasn't too worried about that lack of storytelling that many are often put off by in works of literary fiction. However, I do think that the complete lack of any real plot devices made the book slow-going to the point where it was hard to read in less than a few sittings, despite its short length. 

Overall, I enjoyed this book but wish it had covered more of the issues it brought up in more detail. It could have covered so much more if the author had decided to not end it in the middle of the story and instead gave it a rich, fulfilling conclusion. 

I would recommend it to readers looking for an interesting look into Korean culture and society. 

Main Character: Ara, Kyuri, Wonna, Miho

Sidekick(s): Friends, etc

Villain(s): Beauty standards, society, etc

Realistic Fiction Elements: This book was all very real to life.